The country beyond the Aramaean territory, including the slopes of the Amanos and the deep valleys of the Taurus, was inhabited by peoples of various origin; the most powerful of these, the Khati, were at this time slowly forsaking the mountain region, and spreading by degrees over the country between the Afrin and the Euphrates.*

The Canaanites were the most numerous of all these groups, and had they been able to amalgamate under a single king, or even to organize a lasting confederacy, it would have been impossible for the Egyptian armies to have broken through the barrier thus raised between them and the rest of Asia; but, unfortunately, so far from showing the slightest tendency towards unity or concentration, the Canaanites were more hopelessly divided than any of the surrounding nations.  Their mountains contained nearly as many states as there were valleys, while in the plains each town represented a separate government, and was built on a spot carefully selected for purposes of defence.  The land, indeed, was chequered with these petty states, and so closely were they crowded together, that a horseman, travelling at leisure, could easily pass through two or three of them in a day’s journey.**

* Thutmosis III. shows that, at any rate, they were established in these regions about the XVIth century B.C.  The Egyptian pronunciation of their name is Khiti, with the feminine Khitait, Khitit; but the Tel el-Amarna texts employ the vocalisation Khati, Khate, which must be more correct than that of the Egyptians, The form Khiti seems to me to be explicable by an error of popular etymology.  Egyptian ethnical appellations in iti formed their plural by _-atiu, -atee, -ati, -ate_, so that if Khate, Khati, were taken for a plural, it would naturally have suggested to the scribes the form Khiti for the singular.

** Thutmosis III., speaking to his soldiers, tells them that all the chiefs the projecting spur of some mountain, or on a solitary and more or less irregularly shaped eminence in the midst of a plain, and the means of defence in the country are shut up in Megiddo, so that “to take it is to take a thousand cities:”  this is evidently a hyperbole in the mouth of the conqueror, but the exaggeration itself shows how numerous were the chiefs and consequently the small states in Central and Southern Syria.

Not only were the royal cities fenced with walls, but many of the surrounding villages were fortified, while the watch-towers, or migdols* built at the bends of the roads, at the fords over the rivers, and at the openings of the ravines, all testified to the insecurity of the times and the aptitude for self-defence shown by the inhabitants.

* This Canaanite word was borrowed by the Egyptians from the Syrians at the beginning of their Asiatic wars; they employed it in forming the names of the military posts which they established on the eastern frontier of the Delta:  it appears for the first time among Syrian places in the list of cities conquered by Thutmosis III.

[Illustration:  184.jpg THE CANAANITE FORTRESSES]